The encrypted email service used by US fugitive, Edward Snowden has abruptly shut down, amid a legal fight involving US government attempts to win access to user information.

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Lavabit owner Ladar Levison wrote in a letter posted on the Texas-based company’s website.

Lavabit was founded in 2004 by Texas-based programmers, allegedly prompted by privacy concerns about Gmail, Google’s free, widely-used web-based email service, and their use of the content of users’ email to generate advertisements and marketing data.

Lavabit offered significant privacy protection for their users’ email, including asymmetric encryption. The strength of the cryptographic methods used was of a level that is difficult for even intelligence agencies to crack.

Notorious hacker and founder of Ghacks called the secure email service “probably the most secure, private email service right now”. In July 2013, Lavabit had about 350,000 users, it offered free and paid accounts with levels of storage ranging from 128 megabytes to 8 gigabytes :: Read the full article »»»»

New revelations from former security contractor Edward Snowden that US intelligence agencies have access to a vast online tracking tool have come to light, as lawmakers put secret surveillance programs under greater scrutiny.

The latest revelations follow-on from The Guardian’s stella expose on our privacy, that it’s no longer our own, causing huge public outcry, the tinfoil-hat brigade is in a furore, normal folk have become concerned at what governments are peering at, and most importantly the nefarious are sat back gobsmacked. PRISM, if your at all shocked that such government devices exist, your naive; if your angry, then your possibly delusional.

The Guardian, citing documents from Snowden, published National Security Agency (NSA) training materials for the XKeyscore program, which the newspaper described as the NSA’s widest-reaching system that covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”.

Intelligence analysts can conduct surveillance through XKeyscore by filling in an on-screen form giving only a “broad justification” for the search and no review by a court or NSA staff, the Guardian said :: Read the full article »»»»

The second largest economy on the planet – and arguably the most powerful – China, has launched a venomous attack on the United States, labelling it an “espionage villain” after former US spy Edward Snowden raised new allegations on the far-reaching US cyber-surveillance program, PRISM.

Snowden’s latest allegations have the US spy-program directed squarely at Chinese targets.

The US is seeking to extradite the 30-year-old technician from Hong Kong, where he is holed up after leaking details of secret US intelligence programs to international media outlets.

Snowden’s leaks revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has access to vast amounts of internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video under a government program known as PRISM. The South China Morning Post says documents and statements by Snowden show PRISM also hacked major Chinese telecom companies to access text messages and targeted China’s top Tsinghua University.

US privacy proponentss have blasted Prism as unconstitutional government surveillance, they’ve called for a review of the program. The US Centre for Constitutional Rights says it believes PRISM to be the broadest surveillance order issued in American history. The Bashing China has received over the past decade on civil liberty, internet censorship and human rights now looks like COMPLETE hypocrisy. The scale of PRISM is daunting, it’s flow-on affect for US allies is likely to haunt us for the foreseeable future, ironically.

In an absolutely ironic twist, Snowden’s revelations come just weeks after US president Barack Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held meeting on the subject of China/US relations where the US president took the Chinese leader to task on hacking charges :: Read the full article »»»»

Catch-up! June 7 20113: The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill reported that PRISM was the source for more than 2,000 intelligence reports each month. More than 24,000 reports were issued in 2012. A total of 77,000 intelligence reports have cited PRISM since the program began six years ago.

US intelligence agencies are accessing the servers of nine internet giants as part of a secret data mining program, according to reports from the US and Britain. The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency NSA and FBI had direct access to servers which allowed them to track an individual’s web presence via audio, video, photographs, emails and connection logs.

Seems ALL of Silicon Valley’s behemoths are involved in the program, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, PalTalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube, amusingly they’ve ALL denied any participation in the program. Presently, Twitter seems to be the ONLY techbehemoth NOTtaking part in PRISM?

The USA’s top spy James R. Clapper said the stories contained “numerous inaccuracies,” but he did not offer any details. And he said the law that allowed US government agencies to collect communications from internet companies only permitted the targeting of “non-US persons” outside the United States :: Read the full article »»»»